Rosie Sherry — From a tester community to an education, events, and content business

Rosie Sherry grew a space where software testers shared knowledge into Ministry of Testing, an education and events business. She later turned the experience gained from running communities into paid content and guides at Rosieland. If the first business helped testers improve their expertise, the second helps people who build communities in their day-to-day work.

A community that began from a professional need

Around 2000, while working at a bank, Rosie encountered software testing when she took part in user acceptance testing for an application. Based on that experience, she found work as a tester and later worked freelance and on contract. While attending tech meetups in Brighton, England, she became interested in community building, but she felt that, compared with web design, there were too few spaces for testers to share their experience and ideas.

Software Testing Club, which she started in 2007, was an online forum meant to fill that gap. Rather than planning a large business from the outset, she wanted to create a space where she and other testers could have interesting conversations. She used an externally provided forum service, and the community grew gradually as the conversations continued.

The online conversations gradually expanded into edited content as well. In February 2010, the first issue of The Testing Planet, a newspaper-style publication about software testing, was released, and the first ten issues appeared through March 2013. In effect, turning the community’s expertise into independent reading material took hold before the events business.

As the community grew, it also needed a revenue structure capable of supporting its operator’s livelihood. Rosie explained that one reason she started conferences was the need to make a living through running the community. The standard for sustainability shifted from covering server costs to being able to pay the person who built the community.

A revenue structure built through events and education

The turning point toward full-scale commercialization was the conference. The first TestBash, held in Cambridge in 2012, brought together about 70 testers. Building on relationships formed online, it began turning the experience of people meeting in person and learning into a paid product.

TestBash also reflected the community’s character in its event design. It used a single-track format, with programming on one stage, and valued opportunities for new speakers and ideas to emerge. The 99-second talk, which allowed anyone to give a short presentation, was also a representative participation mechanism. The principles of compensating contributors by the same standard and supporting travel costs are also stated in its official introduction.

The business did not stop at events; it expanded into online courses, talk videos, and a membership service. In the membership offering confirmed on October 5, 2026, free Basic members are given opportunities to participate in the community and local meetups, while paid Professional members receive bundled benefits such as on-demand courses, more than 1,000 talk videos, and online and offline events. Access to events and materials is subject to conditions such as an active membership. It is a structure in which a space for starting relationships for free and paid learning products operate side by side.

The customer base expanded not only to individual testers but also to company teams. It offers both individual and team memberships, and the upper-tier Unlimited membership includes participation in certification programs. In this structure, individual demand for self-development and corporate demand for employee training can be served on the same content and education foundation.

Sponsorship was also a component of the business. For example, TestRail, a test management tool company, announced its participation as a sponsor of Ministry of Testing in 2020 along with scholarship support for one attendee. Seen as a business structure, practitioners participate to learn and connect, while relevant companies gain opportunities to meet a professional audience.

The Team Behind USD 1.5 Million in Annual Revenue

In a public AMA in June 2021, Rosie Sherry said she had grown Ministry of Testing over about 10 years to an annual revenue of USD 1.5 million. This figure is the company-wide annual revenue she disclosed at the time, showing the scale of the business including events and education. The company is described as an independent company with no outside investors.

During its growth, the community also served as a recruitment base. Rosie explained that most people hired at Ministry of Testing had been existing community members, and said she placed importance on genuine interest in the community. The official organization description distinguishes roles including co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Graham Sherry, along with development, community, events and marketing, education, and accounting staff. It was a structure in which community members joined the operations team beyond being customers and contributors.

The expansion of events also prompted a reconsideration of how they were run. In 2019, it held nine conferences in various parts of the world, but in a 2024 interview Rosie recalled operating at that scale as an extremely burdensome experience. She explained that after the pandemic, as the strategy changed, it returned to running one annual conference at that time. It was a choice to move from growth by increasing the number of events to a scale and format that could be sustained.

Rosie Sherry’s role also changed over time. In 2021, she said she would retain co-ownership of Ministry of Testing while not taking charge of day-to-day operations; after running community operations at Indie Hackers, she was handling community work at Orbit. An official profile checked on October 5, 2026 lists her as Founder and CEO of Ministry of Testing, and the site also uses the name MoTaverse.

Rosieland — Selling Rosie Sherry’s operational experience to other customers

A business she developed alongside these activities was Rosieland. Rosie Sherry explained in 2021 that Rosieland had evolved from a newsletter into a paid newsletter and then into a community for community operators. At the time, it was a side project run alongside other work, and a space covering what she learned and experimented with on the ground.

The initial scale of paid subscriptions was very different from Ministry of Testing. In a 5to9 Conference talk, Rosie shared the experience of gaining 35 subscribers within a month and reaching annualized revenue of over USD 5,000. This is a figure annualizing the subscription scale at that point. What she emphasized in the talk was that behind the quickly gained subscriber number lay long community-operations experience and preparation.

Charging was also a mechanism that kept her writing. In a 2022 interview, Rosie described the process of turning the newsletter paid in order to create accountability for continuing to write. The moment money was involved, it shifted from sharing her experience whenever she thought of it to an editorial job of regularly delivering value to readers.

The product Rosieland offers is research and analysis content about communities. The material is categorized by topics such as community research, business models, design, growth, operations, strategy, and tools, and it provides paid articles and a weekly resource roundup. The value for buyers is in reducing the time spent searching for and reading operational information themselves and gaining perspectives and methods they can apply to their own situations.

The content also expanded into individual guides and professional service propositions. In a March 2025 article, Rosie offered The Guide to Community Discovery for separate purchase and explained that the paid subscription provides deeper content. In the same article, she said she was interested in coaching and advisory roles to help apply community research methods in real organizations. With subscription-based knowledge provision at the center, the scope of the offering was broadened toward guide purchases and direct hands-on support.

Community Discovery, as she describes it, is an approach that helps with community-related decisions through relationship-building and research into the surrounding ecosystem. As a practical example, she presented a method of logging useful quotations found in conversations and forums by person and topic, then reusing them for course creation, discovering people to collaborate with, and trend analysis by topic. The specificity of the knowledge sold through Rosieland lies in organizing operational experience this way into observation, recording, and judgment methods that others can follow.

The Business Significance of This Case

Both businesses revolve around ongoing human labor. Ministry of Testing requires producing educational content, running events, and managing member relationships, while Rosieland requires research, writing, and organizing examples. This case is therefore best understood as a combination of a team-based professional education, events, and community business with an operational knowledge content business. Subscription is a payment model that charges for this learning and information.

An important choice in Rosie's path was recognizing community operators' labor as a business expense. What initially only covered costs was transformed into a structure that could pay people, and later the judgment and methods accumulated through doing that work were packaged into a separate product. The fact that practical knowledge gained from the first business was sold to customers in other roles is the expansion approach revealed when Ministry of Testing and Rosieland are viewed together.